Observational Characteristics of Cloud Vertical Profiles over the Continent of East Asia from the CloudSat Data

The CloudSat satellite data from June 2006 to April 2011 are used to investigate the characteristics of cloud vertical profiles over East Asia （20°-50°N, 80°- 120°E）, with particular emphasis on the profiles of precipitative clouds in comparison with those of nonprecipitative clouds, as well as the seasonal variations of these profiles. There are some obvious differences between the precipitative and nonprecipitative cloud profiles. Generally, precipitative clouds mainly locate below 8 km with radar refiectivity in the range of-20 to 15 dBZ and maximum values appearing within 2-4-km height, and the clouds usually reach the ground; while nonprecipitative clouds locate in the layers of 4 12 km with radar refiectivity between -28 and 0 dBZ and maximum values within 8-10-km height. There are also some differences among the liquid precipitative, solid precipitative, and possible drizzle precipitative cloud profiles. In precipitative clouds, radar reflectivity increases rapidly from 11 to 7 km in vertical, implying that condensation and collision-coalescence processes play a crucial role in the formation of large-size drops. The frequency distribution of temperature at -15℃ is consistent with the highest frequency of radar reflectivity in solid precipitative clouds, which suggests that the temperatures near -15℃ are conductive to deposition and accretion processes. The vertical profiles of liquid precipitative clouds show almost the same distributions in spring, summer, and autumn but with differences in winter at mainly lower levels. In contrast, the vertical profiles of solid precipitative clouds change from spring to winter with an alternate double and single high-frequency core, which is consistent with variations of the frequency distribution of temperature at 15℃. The vertical profiles of nonprecipitative clouds show a little change with season. The observations also show that the precipitation events over East Asia are mostly related to deep convective clouds and nimbostratus clouds. These results are expected to be useful for evaluation of weather and climate .models and for improvement of microphysical parameterizations in numerical models.

Retrieval of Liquid Water Path Inside Nonprecipitating Clouds Using TMI Measurements

Quantitative estimates of liquid water path （LWP） in clouds using satellite measurements are critical to understanding of cloud properties and the assessment of global climate change. In this paper, the relationship between microwave brightness temperature （TB） and LWP in the nonprecipitating clouds is studied by using satellite microwave measurements from the TRMM Microwave Imager （TMI） onboard the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission （TRMM）, together with a radiative transfer model for microwave radiance calculations. Radiative transfer modeling shows that the sensitivity is higher at both 37.0- and 85.5-GHz horizontal polarization channels for the LWP retrievals. Also, the differences between the retrieved values responding to TBs of various channels and the theoretical values are displayed by the model. Based upon above simulations, with taking into account the factor of resolution and retrieval bias for a single,channel, a nonprecipitating cloud LWP in the summer subtropical marine environment retrieval algorithm is formulated by the combination of the two TMI horizontal polarization channels, 37.0 and 85.5 GHz. Moreover,by using TMI measurements （1Bll）, this algorithm is applied to retrieving respectively LWPs for clear sky, nonprecipitating clouds, and typhoon precipitating clouds. In the clear sky case, the LWP cl^anges from -1 to 1 g m-2, and its mean value is about 10^-5 g m^-2. It indicates that, using this combination retrieval algorithm, there are no obvious systemic deviations when the LWP is low enough. The LWP values varying from 0 to 1000 g m^-2 in nonprecipitating clouds are reasonable, and its distribution pattern is very similar to the detected results in the visible channel of Visible and Infrared Scanner （VIRS） on the TRMM. In typhoon precipitating clouds, there is much more proportion of high LWP in the mature phase than the early stage. When surface rainfall rate is lower than 5 mm h^-1, the LWP increases with increasing rainfall rate.